Computing systems, such as enterprise computing systems, continue to grow in scale and complexity of their components and interactions. Enterprise computing systems and services exhibit complex behaviors stemming from the interaction of workload, software structure, hardware, network traffic conditions, and system goals, such as service level objectives and agreements. A systems management product is employed in a networked enterprise computing system to administer and monitor different servers running on the network. For example, a system management product can monitor an application server or Web server and determine how much memory is being used, whether a server has crashed, and/or the general state of the running server. When the system management product is monitoring systems (such as the application server or Web server above), there is a balance between collecting enough metrics to provide useful data, but not collecting too much data that could place a high load on the monitored system, as well as flood a monitoring system of the system management product.